Hikvision's Minority Analytics

Author: John Honovich, Published on May 08, 2018

Hikvision has developed and is deploying minority analytics inside China, automatically identifying and categorizing individuals as ethnic minorities. While Hikvision has not marketed this, IPVM has verified this from information disclosed in the company's 'AI Cloud World Summit'.

In this note, we examine the technical approach, concerns about accuracy as well as abuse of minorities by the Chinese government-owned manufacturer's analytics.

The categorization is a true or false (boolean) and does not attempt to categorize by a specific ethnic group. In the West, this would often be assumed to be white or black, but in the context of China, this is most likely Han Chinese or not.

Additionally, the system categorized this person as a male but this is not clear:

Moreover, in that same case study, Hikvision showed which faces were being captured and analyzed, showing many heavily shadowed and captured at a harsh angle.

Despite that, they claim (as the text above shows) that they can track specific visitors, which is hard to believe when they cannot even correctly identify glasses on a person in their own marketing demo.

Minority/ethnicity analytics are certainly technically possible, though, of course, how accurate is one question. However, they are not widely promoted and, in the video surveillance space, Hikvision is the only manufacturer we have seen offering them. One outside the industry example is from a company named Kairos who is using this to celebrate diversity with online ethnic analysis, such as the example below:

Given Hikvision is aware of the significant privacy and political problems of using ethnicity analytics in the West, we doubt they will release this in the US or EU. However, Hikvision USA's VP of Sales touted ethnicity analytics last year in a US security conference so it is not out of the question.

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The world's leading video surveillance information source, IPVM provides the best reporting, testing and training for 10,000+ members globally. Dedicated to independent and objective information, we uniquely refuse any and all advertisements, sponsorship and consulting from manufacturers.